Town Square

Hack a Sim Palo Alto!

Original post made
by Greenacres, Green Acres,
on Jun 6, 2014

Calling all civic-minded hackers!

We need a Sim Palo Alto!

Want to know what happens if you add a certain number of people over here, and there's a disaster over there? How many schools have to be opened and what happens to the commute on Arastradero? Can you quantify the cost of road rage, loss of daylight plane, fewer trees? At what price point does solar become so cheap, suddenly those parking lots get real attractive again... What happens when we have self-driving cars? If the drought lasts a long time?

Better yet, can you make a game engaging enough, with enough accurate information, that people play it and solve our most vexing problems? Wouldn't you like to know if we really are at our infrastructure limit? What if a lot of people playing a game discover the best places we really CAN put some denser building with less of an impact than everywhere else? What happens if the current crop of workers are just like the yuppies of the '80s who wanted condos and then suburbs, and the next wave is suburbs again?

Just think of all the arguments that won't happen because we can see how everything is connected!

High school students: it's a civics project, it's a software design project! Someone Hack a Sim Palo Alto! (Quick , before the next election!)